NVIDIA Surprises Gaming Industry with ‘Project Shield’ at CES 2013

NVIDIA, the California based tech company famous for its graphics processing units is launching its own portable gaming console in the market dubbed as ‘Project Shield’. The device is powered by ‘pure’ Android OS and packs a very powerful punch in terms of hardware specs. NVIDIA has officially announced Project Shield at CES 2013 which is currently going in full swing at Las Vegas.

The unveiling of an Android 4.1 Jelly Bean powered gaming console took everyone by surprise in the industry as the gadget offers some serious social networking, video and audio play back along with hardcore gaming. You can even utilize Steam’s Big Picture Mode and stream a game running on your PC via WiFi (provided the PC is fitted with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX card). Gamers can also stream the output of a game running on Shield to displays of up to 4K resolution (cool isn’t it?).

Shield has the ability to run some really interesting apps such as Hulu, Netflix and a number of games from the Google Play store. It also has a Micro USB, Micro SD slot and a HDMI output.

The most exciting news for the gaming community is the use of NVIDIA’s latest mobile processor – Tegra 4 - in Project Shield as it is a really powerful chip and can deliver high end performance (it is six times more potent than Tegra 3).

As of now no official date or price has been released but as per the report from Forbes, Project Shield will be released sometime in the 2nd quarter of 2013 at an unknown price (as per the specs and abilities of the gadget, it is safe to assume a pretty hefty price).

Check out the official demo of the device embedded below:

What do you think about Project Shield? Will it really revolutionalize gaming industry as portrayed by NVIDIA? Let us know in the comments section below!

I think with Project Shield, NVIDIA wants to tackle the issue about how playing games on console is more relaxing than on PC. With Shield, now PC gamers can play their favorite games anywhere in their house or even in the toilet. That’s how cool this gaming device. And the fact that Project shield is armed with Tegra 3 and other jaw-dropping specs on it, plus Android OS, then NVIDIA can target not only PC gamers with this device, but also many Android gamers out there. However, i still think the majority of buyers of this device is mostly PC gamers.